The house is slowly starting to feel like home, helped significantly by the plumbing of the shower and bath, and the completion of the plastering upstairs.

This all means that (finally) we have moved in to our bedroom and so have a real grown-up bed, not just a mattress on the living room floor.

Today we finished painting the bedroom and landing walls, though we still need to paint the woodwork before the carpet fitters arrive on Tuesday, with only the minor matter of the start of the school year getting in the way of that plan!

The view from the bedroom really has made all the building work worthwhile – it takes our breath away, even with the added scaffolding (which is now waiting for the scaffolders to come and take it away).

Do excuse the post-camping ‘clothes everywhere’ style we are going for at the moment.

We finally managed to move in to our new house on Saturday morning, having decided that living on site was finally possible (working loo, tap & electric sockets in the kitchen working, if no where else, and two serviceable rooms to live in). We are still popping back to my parents’ house for showers though!

It feels like a lot has happened in the three days since we moved, so here’s a summary.

The dining room plaster dried, so we could paint it:

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Our fabulous main builders spent Sunday on the roof fixing the ridge tiles in place (I don’t have a photo of that yet). They also fitted the wetroom boarding ready for tiling.

The plasterer came back and plastered the bathroom today (Monday), so hopefully in the next few days the plumber will be back to fit the bath so the tiling can be done.

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The electricians (there were three of them here at a couple of points today) also came today and lit up the downstairs. This is fabulous as it means we don’t have to use a torch to find the loo after dark. They’ve also fitted the plug sockets in the other rooms downstairs, so we don’t have extension leads everywhere.

Living room recessed spotlights

Kitchen (above the imaginary table)

Dining room

The electricians also switched the oven on, so I made scones. Happy days.

Yesterday we said goodbye to our house in Brighton for the last time. We’d had a “Friends” moment collecting all our keys from local friends and it was finally time to go.

The removals men arrived (after a slight ‘really, gas company, you are choosing this moment to park a huge truck directly over our driveway?’ moment) and made short work of packing our belongings into their van.

It still feels very odd that we aren’t going back to that house, particularly as we can’t unpack everything as the house is still a building site. Having been up and down to the new house so much over the last year is enhancing the feeling of ‘we are only up here for a week, we’ll be back in Brighton soon’. Hopefully we will be able to start living at the house soon, even if fully unpacking is a little way off.

Spot where our oil lamp was…

At least the guinea pigs seem to be settling in to their new home well!

Yes that’s right. We are moving house in 2.5 weeks and at this stage we aren’t particularly confident that the house will be liveable, so it’s likely we’ll be staying with Sarah’s parents for a short spell.

That being said, this weekend things have moved on leaps and bounds.

We managed to find time to travel up for the weekend and on arrival we were excited to find the bifold windows in place!

Landing to balcony

Bedroom

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Plus the first fix electrics and plumbing have been taken care of. Now we can see where the shower head & controls are going to be.

It’s all rather exciting!

But that’s not why we were there. It was time to actually get stuck in and do some work for ourselves because the kitchen walls and ceiling were plastered and the floor was tiled, so it was timed to get the first paint on the walls before the kitchen fitting begins!

We’ve visited the house twice since the last post, in fact I’m writing this one having just spent the day working there, but you’ll hear about that in the next post. Today I’ll share the updates from our last visit.

The framework making up the ‘landing’ has been completed and the remainder of the old gable has been removed. On the other side of the tarp is the beginnings of our balcony!

The wall between the landing and the bathroom has been erectedNow we can see the actual size of the bathroom

Not only have they finished the landing structure, but they’ve also got the bedroom up as well.

Our bedroom

Including the partition wall creating our walk-in wardrobe

Space for a few hangers…

The next surprise was that the wall and door under the main staircase have gone, opening up the hallway space and making the room feel so much bigger! Eventually we’ll have a glass balustrade instead.

Finally, we decided during our last visit that the empty doorway between the dining room and the sun-lounge wasn’t really how we wanted it to stay, so the pillars have now been removed leaving a much larger double-doorway.

In the summer the sun-lounge becomes like an oven and the lack of door means that the heat is passed straight into the dining room and raises the temperature of the house considerably. So we’re going to have some doors added in to regulate this somewhat. We just need to decide if they’ll be sliding doors, bifolds, or just regular doors!

Possibly the most exciting change to date. At least half of the roof has come off and the framework for the dormer has gone up. Here’s a quick before and after:

Old and bustedNew hotness

This view is looking out from our ‘Landing’, which we’ll be using as a sort of reading nook, toward the garden. So where the old gable can still be seen will become doors onto our balcony. We’re going to have our own balcony?!

From the look of the tarpaulin on the right side of the picture it seems they haven’t yet done the same work on the bedroom side, but I expect that’ll be up soon enough.